Abstract (Summary)

Andrew examines the place of patronage in eighteenth-century thought and specifically Diderot's analysis of Seneca's philosophy of the art of graceful giving and grateful receiving. Patronage, in Burke's definition, is "the tribute which opulence owes to genius. However, the patronage of thought has been rarely discussed by political theorists, and when mentioned favorably by thinkers such as Rousseau or Burke, their accounts were not a central theme of their work.

Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press Apr 2004

This piece examines the place of patronage in eighteenth-century thought and specifically Diderot's analysis of Seneca's philosophy of the art of graceful giving and grateful receiving.1 Patronage, in Burke's definition, is "the tribute which opulence owes to genius."2 However, the patronage of thought has been rarely discussed by political theorists, and when mentioned favorably by thinkers such as Rousseau or Burke, their accounts were not a central theme of their work. When patronage was a central theme, such as Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield or D'Alembert's Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands, the practice is deprecated as obsolete.3 Thinkers who pride themselves on their independence of thought have usually been reluctant to declare their dependence upon patrons. However, most of the thinkers of the eighteenth century who preached intellectual independence depended upon royal or aristocratic patronage.4 Indeed, one might say that the ideal of intellectual autonomy was forged in conditions of intellectual dependence on royal or aristocratic patrons.

Francis Bacon wrote that "books, such as are worthy of the name of books, ought to have no other patrons but truth and reason." Yet Bacon's Advancement of Learning, dedicated to James I, is forthright in admitting that most scholars are not independently wealthy and thus must court the rich and must submit to the powerful. In the same work Bacon denounced Seneca as a "Trencher Philosopher" who served and supped well at a royal court.5 Seneca's De Benefits, the classic text on patronage, was often translated into English and French in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries6; and it was highly regarded by eighteenth-century thinkers, such as La Mettrie, Lagrange, Rousseau, D'Holbach, Hume, Smith, and Diderot.7 Since Rousseau shared Hume's admiration for Seneca, Hume concluded his account of Rousseau's ingratitude for Hume's patronage, Exposé succinct de la contestation que s'est élevée entre M. Hume et M. Rousseau, with a quotation from Seneca's De Beneficiis8 Diderot's Essai sur la vie de Sénèque le philosophe, sur ses écrits, et sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron and Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron et sur les Moeurs et les Écrits de Sénèque were unique among eighteenth-century thinkers in providing an extended defense of patronage. Diderot's work is a sustained analysis of Seneca's important treatise on the arts of graceful giving, graceful receiving, and graceful requiting, the three graces that made the world go around.

In Rameau's Nephew Diderot and Rameau agreed that everyone has to get into unnatural postures and jump through hoops to please their patrons. But, Diderot added, "there is one human being who is exempted from this pantomime. That is the philosopher who has nothing and asks for nothing."9 Diderot seems to celebrate the self-sufficient Cynic Diogenes who lived from nature: "Whom does the savage beg from? The earth, the animals and fishes, the trees and plants and roots and streams." But Diderot knew that Diogenes was not one of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's self-sufficient savages; Diogenes lived by begging from his fellow citizens and taking what he needed from others-for all property is common for the wise man. Indeed, the honest Diogenes lived much as did the truth-telling sponge, Rameau. Moreover, Diderot agreed with Rameau's form of Epicureanism-not that money is the chief good but that money is essential for life's vital pleasures. Diderot wrote: "I am far from despising sensual pleasures. I have a palate too and it is tickled by a delicate wine or dish" as well as by beautiful women and drunken parties with his friends.10

In short, Diogenes's life would not have satisfied Diderot. The more useful model of the philosophic life was the immensely rich Stoic, Seneca. Diderot devoted two of his last and longest works to a justification of the life of Seneca, and the place of patronage in living a philosophic life. Diderot was able to obtain relief from his arduous and poorly paid task of editing L'Encyclopédie by dining six nights a week at the expense of Mme Geoffrin, Mme Helvétius, Baron D'Holbach, and others. But he really separated himself from the life conditions of Rameau's nephew when he accepted Catherine the Great's gracious offer to buy up Diderot's library and give him a life pension as custodian of his own library. Seneca's life prospered once he accepted the patronage of Agrippina, Nero's mother, and took on the function of tutor and then advisor to the despotic emperor.

Diderot and Seneca saw themselves as Socratics. Seneca's Socrates differed from the Platonic or Xenophontic Socrates in emphasizing that Socrates lived from aristocratic patronage and rejected royal patronage. Whereas Socrates was condemned to death by a popular assembly, Seneca was condemned to death by his patron, Nero. However, Seneca modelled the manner of his death by hemlock on his philosophic predecessor. Diderot justified the enormous wealth that Seneca had amassed in the service of Nero, as he apologized for serving Catherine the Great. When incarcerated in Vincennes, Diderot translated Plato's Apology, indicating that he, like Socrates and Seneca, was a martyr for philosophy. Diderot's translation seems faithful to the text but he adds in Socrates's address to the jury (Apology, 38d), after he had been given a sentence of death, that money (either the absence of money in fines for jurors to share or else the money citizens would have to pay for Socrates's free board since he claimed not only to be poor but a benefactor of the city [Apology, 3Va]) as well as his refusal to lower himself by appealing to the jurors' pity, was a ground for the verdict.11

What I wish to emphasize in Seneca's and Diderot's reflections on patronage is the vulnerability of thinkers in a different way than Leo Strauss has suggested. Based on his reflections on the life of Socrates, Strauss wrote that thinkers are vulnerable to popular religious prejudices, and he advanced the thesis that readers must take into account the climate of religious persecution and must carefully discern the real intention of the writer beneath the surface of his writing.12 If Strauss is correct in drawing our attention to the need of thinkers for protection from popular prejudice, he is perhaps insufficiently attentive to thinkers' need for economic protection and its ramifications. Before Socrates, Anaxagoras was charged with impiety and depended on his patron, Pericles, for political protection. But the cry of Anaxagoras to his patron was more elemental; according to Plutarch, Anaxagoras exclaimed, "Ah Pericles! Those that have need of a lamp, must take care to supply it with oil."13 Enlightenment is the process of converting oil into light.

Seneca's Socrates

Seneca came close to dissolving the Platonic distinction between a philosopher and a sophist. This distinction was made by a wealthy aristocrat who ennobled the plebeian Socrates by distinguishing him from professional teachers, such as Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic. If Thrasymachus is a professional, Plato's Socrates is an amateur, engaging in dialectical intercourse for love, not money. Thrasymachus, the sophist, is a whore; as the Xenophantic Socrates says: "those who sell their wisdom for money, to any that will buy, men call sophists, or, as it were, prostitutors of wisdom."14 Like courtesans, philosophers make friends. As the courtesan Theodota says to Socrates (Memorabilia, III.xi.4), "If anyone is my friend and is willing to benefit me, he is my means of subsistence." The Xenophontic Socrates (Memorabilia, I.ii.6-8) states that the reason he did not take a fee for his conversation is that he remained free, whereas those who took money for their dialectical intercourse "must of necessity hold discussions with those from whom they received pay." Rather than being wage-slaves or whores, philosophers take part in a gift economy, in which they give their teaching without pay and receive "the greatest gratitude towards his greatest benefactor." If the Xenophontic Socrates is less lofty than the Platonic Socrates, Seneca asserted that Socrates received gifts from rich friends and instilled competition amongst his friends to see who could benefit Socrates most handsomely (Of Benefits, I.viii.l .2).

Seneca's Socrates is quite similar to Xenophon's Socrates as a courtesan who lives from rich friends and stimulates competition so that the philosophercourtesan is not dependent upon one protector. He is not a servant of the rich but rather the rich attempt to outdo one another in the attempt to serve the philosopher. Diderot agreed with Seneca on the source of Socrates's income but adds that Socrates's disciples gave him gifts in proportion to their wealth.15 The poor philosopher is free in the sense of not being servile and in the sense of not being dependent on one source of income. Seneca (Ben.,V.v.2) also tells us that Socrates turned down an offer of patronage from King Archelaus saying that he would be unable to return the benefits Archelaus could confer on him. Seneca wrote that Socrates was free to refuse, a freedom denied those subject to a tyranny. However, Seneca observed, Socrates could have benefitted Archelaus with his wisdom, and thus could have requited whatever benefits Archelaus could have showered on him. Perhaps Socrates turned down the invitation to attend Archelaus's court because he was afraid to refuse gifts from such a powerful man; but, Seneca concluded (Ben., V.vi.7), what Socrates really meant was "that the man whose freedom of speech even a free state could not endure declined to enter into voluntary servitude." Seneca seemed to regret that his attempt to confer his wisdom on Nero meant that he had lost his freedom of speech, and that the wealth he had amassed at a royal court had entailed servitude. Seneca is clear that monarchs cannot bear freedom of speech. Augustus lamented that Agrippa and Maecenas were no longer alive to tell the truth to him about the conduct of his daughter, Julia. Seneca (Ben,VI.xxxii.3-4) commented: "There is no reason for us to suppose that Agrippa and Maecenas were in the habit of speaking the truth to him; they would have been among the dissemblers if they had lived."

Seneca voiced a tension here between republican freedom of speech and the desirability of royal patronage, a tension Diderot and other eighteenth-century philosophers later echoed. Seneca implied that his own wealth was purchased at a high cost, namely, the inability to speak the truth, and seemed to regret that he did not live in a free republic as Socrates did, when he had a choice of accepting or rejecting Archelaus's offer of patronage. But doubtless he reflected on the fact that the republic that gave Socrates such freedom also put him to death.

Although Seneca enjoyed a high reputation in the eighteenth century, philosophers have not invariably recognized Seneca as one of their own. Francis Bacon deprecated Seneca as a "Trencher Philosopher" and moralized that his fortune was not "a true or worthy end."16 Hegel thought Seneca a moralistic rhetorician or sermonizer rather than a philosopher or speculative thinker, a man who corrupted the truth of Stoicism that happiness depends on virtue not fortune, on internal character not external circumstance, by "his allowing Nero to give him wealth untold, and also the fact that he had Nero as his pupil."17 Hegel also criticized Bacon on the same grounds that Bacon had criticized Seneca; namely, that he was an ungrateful and corrupt toady.18 But if one eliminates from the history of philosophy all thinkers who kowtowed to power or were corrupted by wealth, one would drastically thin out the ranks of philosophers. Hegel's criticism of Seneca and Bacon is pronounced from the comfort of an academic chair.

Julien Offray de la Mettrie's Anti-Sénèque described Seneca as "the most illustrious of the Stoics, or rather of the Eclectics (for he was Epicurean and Stoic at the same time, and he chose and took what he found best in each sect)," who combined the Epicurean goal of pleasure with the Stoic goal of virtue, and he emphasized above all the knowledge of truth.19 La Mettrie held that Seneca's Stoicism impeded his happiness. A Stoic is "a sort of leper well armed against the pleasures of life"; and "although he was a tutor to a prince, laden with literary honours and very rich for a man of learning," he was not happy and "wrote about happiness as one writes for a lost dog."20 La Mettrie suggested that his profession as a physician was worthier than that of a moral philosopher since opium provides "more happiness to us than the treatises of all the philosophers."21 La Mettrie's Anti-Sénèque drew strong fire from his fellow materialist, Diderot, for whom he was "dissolute, shameless, buffoon, flatterer, was made for the life of courts and the favour of the great. He died, as he had to die, a victim of his own intemperance and madness."22 To be sure, La Mettrie praised his patron, Frederick the Great, and the practice of patronage; he wrote: "To appreciate worth is worthy and to reward it is divine. Kings: imitate the hero of the North and be the heroes of humanity, as you are its leaders. When you lower yourselves to become patrons, you raise yourselves."23 However, Diderot's attack on La Mettrie as "made for the life of courts and the favour of the great" might be thought to be an instance of the pot calling the kettle black. Diderot's lives of Seneca justified his acceptance of Catherine the Great's patronage.

Seneca on Patronage

Seneca's De Benefits is the locus classicus of patronage. It is now often translated as Of Favors, but I shall stick to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translations as Of Benefits or Des Bienfaits. Favors indeed captures the personal, particularistic, and discretionary character of the gifts given, received and requited in De Benefiis better than the current use of the word "benefits." Seneca emphasized the discretionary character of benefits: "a benefit is something that is given by a stranger (a stranger is one who, without incurring censure, might have done nothing)...."24 A benefit or a favor is thus conceptually distinct from a duty or officium. A benefit is not bestowed on friends or kin; patronage is not nepotism.

Cicero's Offices distinguished ordinary from perfect duties, beneficence from justice (or what others have the right to expect of us) .25 Seneca's Benefits emphasize the former at the expense of the latter. The century spanning the republican Stoicism of Cicero's Offices to the monarchical Stoicism of Seneca's Benefits reflected the transformation of patrician patron-client relationships into imperial bestowal of public office. G. E. M. De Ste. Croix wrote: "With the collapse of the Republic and the virtual elimination of the democratic features of the constitution in the last half-century BC, patronage and clientship became as it were the mainspring of Roman public life."26 Imperial appointment replaced election to public office. To be sure, the staggered voting of the centurial committees was election by wealth not numbers and hardly more democratic than voting in the aristocratic senate. However, De Ste. Croix draws our attention to the distinction between patronage posts and elected office.

For Seneca, patronage, or the discretionary bestowing of benefits, is particular not general. One who benefits everyone benefits no one (Ben., I.xiv.l; Vl.xviii.l). For example, the Hobbesian sovereign who protects everyone by imposing a universal code of law equitably on all subjects is not a patron who confers benefits on all his subjects. When Hobbes (Leviathan, Chap. 11) insisted that benefits oblige and obligations are thraldom, he meant by benefits specific gifts that are conferred by patronage, not the great public good of security that the sovereign provides to all subjects and to which all subjects are obliged. A universal protector is not a particular patron. Although Burke called God "the universal patron," he was straining earthly usage; patronage and universality are mutually exclusive. Indeed, the Hobbesian-Rousseauan-Kantian-Rawlsian formula of justice as fairness, impartiality, or equal subordination of all citizens to universally binding rules is antithetical to the ethics of patronage. However, it is perhaps by means of this antithesis between impartiality and patronage that the latter becomes visible. Without the ideal of res publica or norms of impartiality, particularist distribution systems would not be recognized as patronage; kinship or feudal systems of distribution, if they could wear "a clear public face," would not be understood as patronage.27

Ronald Weissman compared Roman and early modern European patronage:

Like Roman patronage, and unlike feudalism, Renaissance patronage often contravened society's official political ethic, if not necessarily its laws. While a cult of honour and loyalty openly and proudly characterized the feudal ethic, neither in Renaissance Italy nor in ancient Rome did the partiality, implicit in patronage, serve as society's openly and officially sanctioned political morality.28

Patronage does not exist in clan-based societies because the duties of kinship are so pervasive, and in feudal societies because the hierarchical relationships, and attendant obligations, are well defined or clearly specified.

Patronage is unlike feudal homage and capitalist contracts; it is not based on a clear quid pro quo. It is a gift economy where reciprocity is expected by the terms of the exchange but is not spelled out; it is bad form to leave the price tags on when one gives a gift to ensure that one receives another of equal value. Patronage might be located conceptually between inequality and equality. Although the language of friendship was frequently used by both patrons and clients, it is not the friendship of equals; it is asymmetrical, or as Julian Pitt-Rivers defined it, "lop-sided friendships."29 The second Duke of Argyll wrote that his brother Hay, later the Third Duke of Argyll, "wants to make all his friends Tools of Walpole because he finds his ends in so doing.... My Brother Hay prefers his Places to all other Considerations; friendship, Honour, Relationship, gratitude & Service to his Country seem at present to have no weight with him."-10 Friends as placemen or tools of Walpole were not, according to the second Duke real friends. The Third Duke's "friends" included Carmichael, Hutcheson, Smith, Ferguson,Millar, and Stewart,all of whom Argyll appointed to their university positions. The Third Duke's commitment to Senecan patronage, as distinct from the second Duke's commitment to friendship, kinship and feudal honor, was one of the chief stimuli to the Scottish Enlightenment. While patron-client relationships are between social unequals, and might be defended as a means of social mobility or even by egalitarians, such as Rousseau, as the closest thing to justice in a hierarchical world,31 the servility of the relationship is softened by "egalitarian" languages of love and friendship. Thus, in his entry on Locke in L'Encyclopédie, Diderot wrote: "You can acquire a man of merit such as Locke, but you cannot buy him. This is a fact that wealthy people, who use money as the measure of everything, overlook, except perhaps in England. An English lord has rarely complained of the ingratitude of a scholar. We wish to be loved...."32 Senecan patronage is hierarchy dressed up as friendship.

After the violent class struggle and civil wars of the late republic, patronage offered a form of class collaboration and an alternative to armed conflict. For Seneca "obedience is to be won by benefits rather than by arms."33 Seneca's advice to princes is the opposite ofthat of chapter 16 of Machiavelli's Prince, where he recommended arms not benefits to Lorenzo di Medici, a member of a family that had ruled Florence for a century by means of patronage. For Seneca the highest virtue is liberality or generosity. Seneca's De dementia, written to encourage Nero to rule with clemency rather than severity, is the antithesis of chapter 17 of The Prince, where Machiavelli recommended cruelty rather than clemency, arguing that it is safer for a prince to be feared than loved. Seneca's patronage is not only an alternative to Hobbesian justice but also to sovereign rule by the sword.

If J. G. A. Pocock has characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republican thought as "the Machiavellian moment," an alternative "Senecan moment" might characterize those thinkers partaking of royal or aristocratic patronage systems in which liberality is the greatest virtue and gratitude the virtuous response. I should like to add a third model to supplement C. B. Macpherson's typology of liberal constitutionalism as possessive individualism and J. G. A. Pocock's typology of republicanism as civic humanism. Let us call these ideal types the Lockean, Machiavellian, and Senecan moments in eighteenth-century thought.

Within the patronage system ingratitude is the worst of vices. In Dante's Inferno (Canto 34, 60-66) the ninth circle, the darkest part of hell is reserved for those, such as Judas and Brutus, who have betrayed benefactors. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, would have consigned Thomas Hobbes to hell as a Leveller who exhibited "extreme malignity to the Nobility, by whose bread he hath bin alwaies sustained...."34 Another egalitarian, Rousseau, was later to face the same charge as Hobbes, that is, of biting the hand that fed him. John Locke did not make the mistake of his philosophic predecessor. In a letter to the earl of Pembroke, to whom he later dedicated An Essay concerning Humane Understanding, 'Locke protested too much that he was not ungrateful to his former patron, Lord Shaftesbury, whom he had served so faithfully. He wrote:

some of my friends, when they consider'd, how small an advancement of my fortune I had made, in soe long an attendance, have thought, that I had noe great reason to brag of the effects of that Kindenesse. I say not this, my lord, to complain of my dead master, it will be noe way decent in me, But in this extremity, I cannot but complain of it as an hard case, that haveing reaped soe litle advantage from my service to him whilst liveing, I should suffer soe much on that account now he is dead.35

While soliciting Pembroke's patronage, Locke knew that he should not appear ungrateful to his former patron. Adam Smith knew that gratitude is not only the effect but the cause of patronage: "the sentiment which most immediately and directly prompts us to reward, is gratitude." Smith provided a full account of the psychological, as distinct from the material, benefits of patronage:

What most charms us in our benefactor, is the concord between his sentiments and our own, with regard to what interests us so nearly as the worth of our own character, and the esteem that is due to us. We are delighted to find a person who values us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, with an attention not unlike that which we distinguish ourselves. To maintain in him those agreeable and flattering sentiments, is one of the chief ends proposed by the returns we are disposed to make to him. A generous mind often disdains the interested thought of extorting new favours from its benefactor, by what may be called the importunities of its gratitude. But to preserve and to increase his esteem, is an interest which the greatest mind does not think unworthy of its attention.36

Thus the liberal-constitutional moment, founded on a vocabulary of justice as the impartial application of rules safeguarding liberty and property, the Machiavellian moment, founded on a vocabulary of the virtue of the citizen-soldier who steadfastly maintains the public good and avoids the corruptions of commercial self-interest and Christian soul-interest, and the Senecan moment, founded on the generosity of the tasteful patron who elicits gratitude and genius (or talented service), are mutually exclusive. Rather they are complementary intellectual systems in dynamic tension within eighteenth-century thinkers.

The Roman principale was one of the high water marks of patronage. Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV designates four great ages when the arts have flourished; the age of Alexander, the age of Augustus, the age of the Medicis, and finally, the age of Louis XIV. Voltaire's classification exhibits an anti-republican bias or a predisposition to monarchical patronage. Indeed, in his Encyclopédie entry gens de lettres Voltaire asserts that writers are more independent-minded than other men and need royal patronage "to strengthen this independence in them" or else they will have to abase themselves to aristocrats. Like eighteenth-century France, the Roman principate was a period in which novi homines (new men, or men from a non-senatorial background), as well as mistresses of kings or emperors, had unprecedented opportunities to acquire power and wealth. The old aristocracy in the Roman principate was either killed when senators opposed the emperor or bought off by gifts and grants for support (as in eighteenth-century France), while new men and provincials filled the Senatorial ranks. It was in this context that beneficia, or material interests, replaced fides, faithful or loyal service, as the principle of the Roman empire,37 and perhaps also of Bourbon France.

Montesquieu was more the exception than the rule of les lumières in favoring a role for hereditary aristocrats in government. Seneca's neglect of the senatorial classes was followed in the political theories of Voltaire, Diderot, and Linguet even more than Rousseau. The Roman principate could even be imagined to embody the Enlightenment demand of careers open to talents. By the end of the first century of the Christian era, "ability and loyalty rather than nobility earned promotion and privileges."38 Agrippa and Maecenas (whose name has become proverbial for patronage, since he passed on Augustus's favor to poets, such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Propertius) were favorites of Augustus. Seneca, a well-born but not aristocratic provincial, became the wealthiest man of his time, a patron of Juvenal and Martial, the richest of all philosophers and one who surpassed all others "in singing the praises of poverty."39 J. P. Sullivan wrote that "the connection between literature, patronage and politics and between art, economics and political advancement" was "nowhere more clearly seen than in the Neronian period."40 Seneca was not the only philosopher that thought monarchy was the regime most hospitable to philosophy but came to a bad end at the hands of Nero.41 It was the best of times and the worst of times for philosophers; as Ronald Syme wrote, the monarchical court was filled with "doctors and magicians, philosophers and buffoons."42

Seneca's monarchic doctrine was presented in De dementia and De Beneficiis. Emperors are to rule with humanity and mercy rather than severe justice, and by means of the liberal bestowing of benefits. However, these generous ideals may be considered anti-republican; as Miriam Griffin wrote, liberality and clemency "presuppose the inferior position of those they benefit."43 They are, as stated above, the antitheses of the Machiavellian virtues of frugality and cruelty. However, patronage provides a social glue for hierarchical societies and thus Seneca's teaching was read with attention by republicans as well as monarchists in the eighteenth century. The longest of Seneca's moral essays is concerned with beneficia, reciprocal exchange of services, a custom "which more than any other binds together human society."44 Sir Roger L'Estrange's abridgement of Seneca declared:

The Benefits of Princes, and Great Men, are Honours, Offices, Moneys, Profitable Commissions, Countenance and Protection: The Poor Man has nothing to present, but Good-Will, Good Advice, Faith, Industry, the Service and Hazard of his Person, an early Apple peradventure, or some other cheap Curiosity:...45

Seneca's De Beneficiis elaborates the art of patronage, or of securing grateful obedience; it comprises the art of gracious giving, grateful receiving, and graceful requiting. The three graces, holding hands and dancing around in a circle, make the world go around (Ben., I.iii.2.6). Only wise men really know how to bestow benefits and repay favors.46 Seneca asserted (Ben., Il.xxii. 1): "The man who receives a benefit with gratitude repays the first installment on his debt." Indeed (Ben., II.xxx.2), "he who receives a benefit gladly has already returned it." Seneca counseled against enacting legislation against ingratitude-for the art of graceful giving will minimize base ingratitude-but the ingratus homo, was for Seneca as for Cicero, "the lowest form of social life."47

Seneca accepted Aristotle's view (Nicomachean Ethics, IX.vii) that the love of benefactors for those benefited may be stronger than vice versa, because conferring favors is active and honorable, while receiving them is passive and dishonorable. But Seneca's treatise on patronage does not encompass the psychology of ingratitude or help to explain Seneca's ingratitude to his patron, Agrippina, or his probable complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero. Whatever Seneca's practice, his teaching on Benefits (II.xx.2) was that tyrannicide is fruitless and that Brutus was wrong to kill his benefactor. Seneca's view that Brutus's assassination of Caesar was wrong and fruitless must be assessed in the context of the amount of dissimulation necessary to survive in the courts of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. To be sure, Seneca's statement about the folly of Brutus's trying to resurrect a republic-namely, "a state reaches its best condition under the rule of a just king" (Ben., II.xx.2)-is consistent with Stoic doctrine.48 To the extent that the contemplative life is superior to the active life, or the life of philosophy is preferable to that of the statesman and citizen-soldier, monarchy may be preferable to republics. Contemplatives, Seneca stressed, need the leisure provided by monarchs. In letter 73 to Lucilius, which his translators have entitled "On Philosophers and Kings," Seneca wrote:

It seems to me erroneous to believe that those who have loyally dedicated themselves to philosophy are stubborn and rebellious, corners of magistrates or kings or of those who control the administration of public affairs. For, on the contrary, no class of men is so popular with the philosopher as the ruler is; and rightly so, because rulers bestow upon no men a greater privilege than upon those who are allowed to enjoy peace and leisure.

If kings and philosophers are naturally linked in patron-client relationships, philosophers are ready to acknowledge their debt to rulers by obedience and loyal service. The Senecan moment in eighteenth-century political thought is manifest in patron-client relationships between monarchs and philosophers. Seneca's letter 73 to Lucilius contains the central doctrine:

This is what philosophy teaches us most of all,-honourably to avow the debt of services received, and honourably to pay them; sometimes, however, the acknowledgement itself constitutes payment. Our philosopher will therefore acknowledge that he owes a larger debt to the ruler who makes it possible, by his management and foresight, for him to enjoy rich leisure, control of his own time, and a tranquillity uninterrupted by public employments.49

The Senecan moment of eighteenth-century thought can be seen in what is often taken to be the definitive statement of Enlightenment objectives, Immanuel Kant's What is Enlightenment? Kant defined Enlightenment as daring to think for oneself in a work commissioned by Frederick the Great's Kultusminister, Count Von Zedlitz, to whom Kant dedicated his Critique of Pure Reason.50 Kant's What is Enlightenment? simultaneously celebrated intellectual autonomy and characterized Enlightenment as the age of Frederick the Great. Kant thought that subjection to Frederick's tolerant autocracy best promoted freedom of thought: "A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people's intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent."51 Philosophy may be better promoted by monarchies than republics. Free speech, coupled to obedience to authority, was the definitive slogan of the Enlightenment. Bentham's dictum to speak freely and obey punctually was espoused by Kant and Diderot. Graciously deferring to his royal patron, Frederick the Great, as Diderot did to Catherine the Great, Kant praised his royal patron:

But only a ruler who is himself enlightened and has no fear of phantoms, yet who likewise has at hand a well-disciplined and numerous army to guarantee public security, may say what no republic would dare to say: Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!

Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville also concluded: "We must speak out against senseless laws until they are reformed and, while waiting for reform, submit to them."52 The Enlightenment's conjunction of free speech and obedience to law implied a disjunction of theoretical and practical boldness. Kant and Diderot agreed with Seneca that monarchy may facilitate a contemplative or theoretical life but they seemed more optimistic than Seneca that freedom of speech is consistent with subjection to monarchical authority.

Diderot's Seneca

Diderot's lives of Seneca, which contain sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron in their titles, are concerned with the unstable times in which Senecaand Diderot-lived. Diderot's works are about patronage writ large. As Jean Starobinski noted, the classical asymmetry of patron to client "is if anything more pronounced when the person flattered is not merely a wealthy individual but a tyrant or prince."53 Ostensibly about Seneca's relationship to Nero, Diderot's Essai sur la vie de Sénèque and his Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron constitute his apology for his relationship to Catherine the Great and a counter to Rousseau's Confessions. The editors of Diderot's Oeuvres Complètes have appended Diderot's Note sur la désunion de Diderot et de J.-J. Rousseau to his Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron.54

Seneca's and Diderot's services to their patrons, Nero and Catherine, are to be understood with respect to the uncertain succession to the thrones of Rome and Russia. In Russia, Peter the Great had abolished hereditary succession and Catherine's predecessor, Empress Elizabeth, had supplanted Ivan VI, who was killed in prison during Catherine's reign. Catherine came to the throne after her husband had been killed by Catherine's lover, Count Orlov and his brothers. Catherine's rise to power by the murder of her husband and rival to the throne follows the pattern set by Seneca's patron, Agrippina, the mother of Nero. Agrippina rescued Seneca from banishment in Corsica after securing the affections of emperor Claudius, established her son, Nero, as successor to the throne, gave Seneca the post of tutor to Nero and then had Claudius and his heir, Britannicus, killed. Agrippina was later killed by her son once Nero was secure on the throne. The parallel between Agrippina, the patron of Seneca, and Diderot's own patron, Catherine, could not have escaped the attention of Diderot or his friend, D'Alembert, who declined Catherine's offer of enormous wealth to be the tutor of her son Paul. Since Catherine had claimed that her murdered husband died from a severe colic brought on by a hemorrhoidal hemorrhage-doubtless, from Catherine's point of view, a suitably ignoble death-D'Alembert remarked to Voltaire that he dare not go to Russia because he was prone to hemorrhoids and apparently such was a mortal illness in Russia.55

Agrippina's responsibility for the death of her husband Claudius and Catherine's responsibility for the death of her husband Tsar Peter gave employment to philosophers in the task of legitimizing her rule. Catherine employed D'Alembert, Voltaire, Diderot, Grimm, Galiani, Condorcet, and Samuel and Jeremy Bentham to present a benign image to the west as Nero employed Seneca as speech writer defending the deaths of Claudius, Nero's rival Britannicus, and finally his mother and Seneca's patron, Agrippina. Together with Voltaire, Diderot arranged for Othe suppression of the French ambassador to Russia's hostile account of Catherine's coup d'état.56 When a young man, Diderot thought Seneca's covering up Nero's crimes to be shameful but, after he accepted Catherine's patronage, he took a more mature outlook on Seneca's relation to Nero.

Diderot indirectly justified patronage and attacked Rousseau's refusal of royal patronage in his Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron et sur les Moeurs et les Écrits de Sénèque, his longest and final work. In justifying the conduct and writings of Seneca in a period of despotism, Diderot was justifying himself. He referred frequently to Rousseau's ingratitude to benefactors and stated that what Rousseau wrote to Malesherbes, he told Diderot twenty times, namely, that Rousseau couldn't bear dependence on benefactors.57 But as Diderot wrote, his life of Seneca was not intended to belittle Rousseau; rather, "it is my apology."58 Diderot's account of the life of Seneca was his self-accounting, his response to Rousseau's Confessions. Diderot's friendship with Rousseau was broken over the issue of patronage, and specifically over Rousseau's ingratitude to his patronne, Mme d'Épinay, or his refusal to accompany her to Geneva. While Rousseau wrote that Mme d'Épinay's venereal dis ease was the reason he was unable to accede to her request that he accompany her to Geneva, Diderot expressed proper gratitude to Mme Geoffrin for refurnishing his apartment (including paintings by Rubens and Vernet) by writing Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre for her, and almost repressing Rousseauan resentment of the rich in the prescribed requital.

Diderot wholeheartedly espoused the reciprocal relationship between philosophers and kings, presented in Seneca's letter 73 to Lucilius. Seneca has proved "that the philosopher is anything but a seditious rebel or bad citizen" (ERCN, 492). Philosophers respect law and order, and teach magistrates, generals, priests, sovereigns, and subjects their duties. Although Diderot recognized the customary laurels by which patrons crown talents are "academic honours, pensions, and ecclesiastical benefices," Diderot did not want the bishopric that Hume desired from his patron, Lord Hertford. Rather, Diderot recommended that philosophers be awarded a civic crown of oak leaves for saving citizens from priestly superstition and educating them in civic duties (EVSP, 691 ; ERCN, 539). It is priests not philosophers who preach sedition and revolution against monarchies (ERCN, 493). Religion inculcates millennial expectations, whereas philosophy preaches Stoicism in the masses. "Man is exposed to misfortune and pain; the philosopher teaches man how to suffer" (ERCN, 492). As distinct from the priest, "it is the philosopher who feels a benefit, it is he who is prompt in recognizing it and requiting it by his acknowledgment" (ERCN, 493).

While Diderot accepted Seneca's view that the pacific vocation of philosophy ties it to monarchy, he could not espouse Seneca's counsel of reclusion in the face of tyranny. In letter 14 to Lucilius Seneca wrote: "So the wise man will never provoke the anger of those in power; nay, he will even turn his course, precisely as he would turn from a storm if he were steering a ship."59 Diderot loftily commented that Seneca's advice here is cowardly, counseling us to suppress the truth and deny the philosopher's vocation. "What then is the use of philosophy, if it remains silent? Either speak or renounce the title of the educator of the human race. You will be persecuted, that's your destiny; one will see you drink hemlock" (EVSP, 672; ERCN, 513-14). Philosophers, Diderot airily asserted, prefer a virtuous attachment to truth to life itself, and look forward to future princes to put into practice philosophic truths, even if present princes take their lives (EVSP, 637; ERCN, 455). Less loftily, Diderot espoused "a great and useful idea" from D'Alembert's Éloge de l'abbé de Saint-Pierre that men of letters leave a will where they can freely write what their conscience dictates unrestrained from the fear or circumspection required in despotic regimes; in their last will and testament, writers would be able "to ask the pardon of their century for only having a posthumous sincerity" (ERCN, 467). Prudently, Diderot withheld his critical observations on Catherine's Nakaz until after his death. Catherine, for her part, when assuming patronage of Diderot, wrote to Diderot's friend and Catherine's client, Grimm, commanding, "Acquire for me all the works of Diderot. Of course they will not get out of my hands and will not harm anyone. Send them together with the library."60 Catherine did not want her subjects to be corrupted by the writings of those she patronized, such as Voltaire and Diderot.

Diderot thought Seneca wrong to think philosophers must accept the favors of a tyrant. Diderot wrote (ERCN, 345): "the philosopher must refuse the gifts of a tyrant. The more the gifts are illegitimate, the more the refusal must be stubborn; there is no overpowering force against probity." Complementing these lofty words about truth overpowering tyranny, Diderot added that the pension he received from Catherine was not from a tyrant but from "a great sovereign" (ERCN, 616). Seneca's and Diderot's writings add some dimensions to Strauss's views on persecution and the art of writing; both accepted patronage but, more or less consciously, accepted the servile status, or limits to free speech, that patronage implied. Samuel Johnson, who was much more candid than the philosophes about accepting royal patronage, could no longer toast the Stuarts with the money given him from the House of Hanover, and in his writing for the government Johnson thought the decision what to publish legitimately fell to his employers.61 Voltaire, another recipient of Catherine's patronage, was more earthy than Diderot with respect to the conflict between truth and power. When criticized for the errors in his commissioned history of Peter the Great, Voltaire replied: "My dear fellow, they gave me excellent fur cloaks and I am a very chilly mortal."62

Diderot thought Seneca's De Beneficiis to be a "sublime treatise" (ERCN, 474), full of "divine precepts" and "celestial sentiments" (EVSP, 690) surpassing all of Seneca's other writings in its fecundity (EVSP, 696; ERCN, 545). It provides a model of how philosophers should respond to the benefactions of the powerful (EVSP, 689; ERCN, 537). Indeed, patronage is an essential complement to Adam Smith's self-interested market exchanges of goods and services. Diderot was typical of eighteenth-century thinkers in merging Bernard Mandeville's egoism with Lord Shaftesbury's sociability or benevolence. Diderot (ERCN, 456-57) answered the great question he posed: "What is the object of philosophy? It is to tie men together by a commerce of ideas, and by the exercise of mutual beneficence." Eighteenth-century civil society, that is, a marketplace of goods, services, and ideas complemented by the shadow market of patron-client relations, supplants the mighty Leviathan, or state force holding together asocial individuals.

Despite occasional criticisms of Seneca's cowardice and toadying, especially with respect to his Consolation to Polybius, Diderot's Essai sur la vie de Sénèque and Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron are spirited defenses of Seneca as well as apologies for his own "living," or the importance of patronage to the philosophic way of life. Diderot denounced as aristocratic prejudice those who criticized the philosopher for amassing enormous wealth from Nero's patronage; no one comments adversely on the patricians who profited under the Principale because "they are only the Great, and Seneca was a sage!" (ERCN, 408). Men of letters as well as hereditary aristocrats have a right to amass great wealth. Moreover, Seneca was a generous benefactor to other men of letters with his great fortune.

Diderot defended Seneca against the charge that he educated Nero poorly since the emperor was "born wicked" (EVSP, 555; ERCN, 324), but he also credited Seneca with the fact that Nero was "an excellent emperor" for the first five years of his reign and as a virtuous tutor could not abandon his charge later (ERCN, 328). "Seneca wrote, lived and died as a sage" (ERCN, 329). Indeed, for purity of word and deed in corrupt times, Diderot was tempted to call his teacher on patronage "Sancte Seneca" (EVSP, 676; ERCN, 518). Following his acknowledgment of Catherine as his sole patron after long travails earning his living and enriching merchants of E'Encyclopédie, which inhibited him from following his bent as a philosopher and writer (ERCN, 620), Diderot summed up Seneca as "a great thinker, a virtuous educator and a great minister" (ERCN, 621). Diderot thought philosophers were the educators of the human race: "two great philosophers were two great educators: Aristotle raised Alexander; Seneca raised Nero" (ERCN, 518). Voltaire educated Frederick and Diderot educated Catherine. Diderot recommended that "the choice of a prince's tutor should be the privilege of the entire nation that the prince governs" (ERCN, 324). But Diderot was only highlighting the importance of philosophic tutors. He did not think an unenlightened people had the wisdom to select wise tutors, for Enlightenment is the result of princes' implementing reforms proposed by philosophers. Diderot insisted (EVSP, 665; ERCN, 506):

The common man [l 'homme peuple] is the stupidest and wickedest of men; to take the commonness from man [se dépopulariser] or to make him better, is the same thing.

The voice of the philosopher that counters that of the people, is the voice of reason.

The voice of the sovereign that counters that of the people, is the voice of madness.

Powerful princes fed the Enlightenment illusion that philosophers could rule kings; Frederick the Great wrote Christian Wolff that "philosophers must be the preceptors of the universe and the master of princes: what the philosophers thought and discovered, monarchs would put into practice."63 He also wrote Voltaire that "Authors are the legislators of the human race," and he wished "that you might be the tutor of princes." Indeed, Frederick wrote Voltaire: "the Newtons and the Wolff s, the Lockes and the Voltaires, the men who think best, should be the masters of the world."64 To be sure, Frederick did not discount the importance of the role of the patron in sponsoring the genius of his clients; writing in the French that Voltaire taught him, Frederick concluded his De la Littérature Allemande with the prediction that German literature will flourish when his people have Medicis: "Des Augustes feront des Virgules."65 Diderot and Voltaire praised Catherine for enlightening her people, as Kant praised his patron Frederick the Great for enlightening his people. Catherine's patronage of Diderot relieved him of the bitter poverty that he described in his alter ego, Rameau's nephew; it helped him and Voltaire with Enlightenment causes in France, such as obtaining redress for the Calas family, and provided him with the illusion of bringing civilization or reform to Russia by means of Catherine's enlightened despotism. Voltaire wrote to Catherine on 22 December, 1767: "Your writings are a monument to your fame; there are three of us, Diderot, D'Alembert and myself, who raise altars to you; you are making a pagan of me: madam, I fall at your majesty's feet not merely with profound respect, but in idolatry."66 Of the three pagan priests, Diderot was the only one sufficiently poor to have to travel to Russia to pay his profound respect to the pagan idol. Daniel Brewer wrote: "The Enlightenment as a whole can be summed up as the conjuncture of knowledge and power."67 The relationship of Diderot and Catherine, based on Seneca's relationship to Agrippina and Nero, was then the Enlightenment writ large.

Conclusion

Diderot's reflections on Seneca's life and work share his ambivalence about the trade-off between republican liberty and monarchical patronage. Diderot was pleased with the great assistance France was giving to the heroic American struggle for liberty at the time he was writing his Essais (ERCN, 558-59). Even republicans, such as Thomas Paine, who made no money from his best-selling Common Sense, and had to write begging letters to George Washington and the Committee of the Continental Congress for recognition of his services, defended monarchical patronage. Paine wrote a wealthy New York landowner, General Lewis Morris, that "the most famous and respected" countries "are those which distinguished themselves by promoting and patronizing science, and on the contrary those which neglected or discouraged it are universally denominated rude and barbarous." In a particularly odd note coming from a republican, Paine praised Catherine the Great and Louis XIV as great patrons of enlightenment.68 Paine also wrote the earl of Shelburne, the patron of Smith, Price, Priestley, Bentham, and others, whose ministry made peace with the French and Americans, asking for favor.69

Another republican and anarchist, William Godwin, wrote in 1793 that "It is but lately that men have known that intellectual excellence can accomplish its purpose without a patron. At present, amongst the civilised and well informed a man of slender wealth, but of great intellectual powers and a firm and virtuous mind, is constantly received with attention and deference...."70 Unfortunately, after marrying Mary Wollstonecraft and taking responsibility for her children-he did not dispose of them as Rousseau did to maintain his independence-he was forced to have recourse in the 183Os to a patronage appointment as Office Keeper and Yeoman Usher of the Receipt of the Exchequer. Republican liberty and the free marketplace of ideas, without patronage, do not automatically produce the conditions in which philosophy flourishes. Seneca and Diderot were not toadies. Rather, they addressed the problem of the conditions of a philosophic existence more directly than most other thinkers. The age of institutional support for thought and scholarship, open competition for civil service and academic positions, tenure, and social security were yet to come. The liberal director of the book police and protector of the Encylopedists, Chrétien-Guillaume de Malesherbes asserted that all men of letters are animated by the desire for glory. Malesherbes continued: "However, since one cannot live on glory, it is by the favours of the court, or the patronage positions which the court names, that they have hoped to subsist in their old age, at an age when assistance has become a necessity."71

University of Toronto.

[Footnote]

1 Thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Sophie Bourgault, and Robert Sparling.

2 Edmund Burke, "Letter to a Member of the National Assembly," The Writings and Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke in Twelve Volumes (Toronto, 1901), IV, 27.

6 Seneca's De Beneficiis was frequently translated into English and French in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including two French translations in 1776 and a new translation in 1778 when Baron D'Holbach published Seneca's collected works. In 1678, Sir Roger L'Estrange, the chief apologist for the Stuart court, published an abstract of Seneca's Of Benefits that went through four editions and two re-issues before the Glorious Revolution, and another twenty editions in the eighteenth century. After the American Revolution, at least sixteen different editions and printings of Lestrange's abridgement of Seneca were published in the next seventy years.

40 J. P. Sullivan, Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 19.

41 Jocelyn M. C. Toynbee, "Dictators and Philosophers in the First Century A.D.," Greece and Rome, 13 ( 1944), 46-49. Musonius Rufus was banished by Nero, Thraesea Paetus was killed by Nero for his abstention from public life, and Seneca was ordered to kill himself for his association with Pisonian conspirators against Nero.